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These digital-to-analog converter boxes were designed to assist OTA viewers with analog-only tuners, not cable viewers with analog-only tuners. See the chart at "Ways To Prepare" here http://www.ntia.doc.gov/dtvcoupon/index.html

Some more screen caps of the Magnavox STB in use:
1 When watching a channel you can display the station info and a signal strength meter
2 Shows the EPG - depending on the station, I've been ale to see up to 6 hours of PSIP guide information
3 Time zone and Daylight Savings Time settings
4 This shows the tuning bug - you can try and tune to any channel from 2-99

I too picked one up from Walmart. I am going to return it because I am just testing it and did not want to burn up coupon for it. I am good a sealing stuff back up.

OK if I had the coupon I might keep it because it's the first box I tested and is good overall. It is fairly simple and defaults to channel 3 for RF out. The picture is OK for RF and need to test video out next.

My goal with this unit was to get Syracuse NY channels from Utica. I live about a mile from the Utica city line going north about 55 miles from Syracuse.

The bad
No svideo out
No buttons on the box itself other than power rocker switch.
Remote has small buttons on it.
Could use more feedback when scanning like listing the last channel it found.
Just 480i out. HD would be GREAT.

Can this Magnavox display the full 16x9 image at 480i? I was thinking about using one of these on an old HD 16x9 TV and want to know if it will display the actual size image without any cropping or letterboxing when the channel is transmitting an HD show.

I just grabbed two of these from WalMart for $10 each after coupon. They're great! My wife has a little office TV and I tried it on that. I get all the channels I usually get OTA, but with the chincy rabbit ears her TV came with. All the channels look good and work fine with only 60% signal strength.

I bought this box from Wal-Mart to check it out. These are my impressions.

Positives:

It was very easy to connect and set up and it quickly found 23 channels (includes "sub channels") which is about everything there is where I live. (If you do a re-scan, channels from the previous scan are replaced with the results of the new scan.) Anyone who is used to watching blurry and/or snowy analog TV will be very pleased with the crisp picture. I tried adding and deleting channels and it worked fine. The menus seemed clear and easy to navigate (I didn't try the v-chip menu however).

Negatives:

The box doesn't allow analog signals to pass through to the TV. That is important if you want to receive stations that are still broadcasting in analog (mostly low power stations) or have another signal source such as satellite or cable. You'll have to split the signal before the box to overcome that. Also, the remote doesn't turn the TV on or off or adjust the volume. And, there are no buttons on the remote for closed captioning or for changing the picture format (letterbox, zoom or full screen). You'll have to use the menus for that. There are no buttons on the box itself so if you lose or break the remote you are out of luck. Actually, there is an on/off button on the side of the box which is easy to overlook and is not documented in the owners manual. So if your box seems completely dead, check the button.

Overall:

For $10 after the coupon its good deal IMHO. However, I'm planning to return the box. Individually, no negative is a deal breaker, but for me when you add them together, I think it might be better to do some more looking even if it costs a little more.

Decided to void my $12 warranty and run a side by side comparison, I have 2 magnavox tb100s, both were made on 071229 and have sequencial serial numbers. I removed the lid and drilled some ventilation holes in one and closed the unit back up, plugged in both units and connected them up as if I was using them normally, after an hour on the same channel the ventilated unit is running at 87 degrees and the factory unit is running at 110. Seems like they don't want these to last people very long, I could understand some of these units that have external AC/12vDC adapters would not need much ventilation but units like this with an internal power supply should have vents.
Whoever appoved these really did their homework!

Here are some pics of the inside of the unit. You can see two empty output slots one looks like s video or smart antenna and the other possibly digital audio, this has three chips one says japan , one says samsung and one says sharp also has a connector port possibly for firmware update on the circuit board directly above the sanyo tin can tuner.

Pros: Cheap, locks onto and displays weak signals even while using a 6" uhf remote antenna at 35 miles from transmitters. (Your results will vary with haat)

Cons: No controls on unit to change channel or setup, if power fails does not auto reboot back to tuned channel and display video must be turned back on, lack of ventilation in lid, manual add channel bug,look & feel of remote reminds you of a 1980s sears tv, signal meter works on a delay.

I bought the DTV converter box and am debating whether to keep it or not. I bought it last Saturday and hooked it up to my 7-year-old JVC 20" CRT TV that I have in my apartment in the Oklahoma City area. I have never had cable, I view off-the-air broadcasts only, when I do watch TV. I think they designed these boxes with people like me in mind, rather than people who already have cable and don't have to worry about a digital signal.

The little unit is Energy Star compliant, which is important to me. Hooking it up was easy, as long as you remember, if you've got it hooked up to a recording device like I do, to turn on the recording device and set it to the auxiliary channel so that you can see the wizard that comes up on the screen. After that, you just follow the instructions and let it do its work. The audio question it asks is tricky; I chose audio out since I was using the RCA cables to connect to my DVD recorder.

The Autoscan picked up a lot of channels! Granted, I live less than 10 miles from the majority of the stations in the city area. A couple of them were just shots of the weather radar looping around, but I got a station with cheesy telenovelas which should be fun, and I may even be able to watch a soccer game on TV! It's very exciting to see an extra PBS channel and to get to see Charlie Rose again after 20 years of not being shown here. Whether it picked up ALL the channels in the area, I can't say, but it did pick up the ones I'm likely to watch except, at first, our ABC affiliate, KOCO. This was upsetting because I do like Oprah, Ugly Betty, and other programs that I like to record. So I had to research and found out that even though it's on Channel 5, I had to manually punch in 7.1 for it to come in, and then the tuner brought it in as 5.1! Very weird. But, after that, it had no problem finding it again.

Some people may not like the way it has to search for and lock in a channel, but it doesn't bother me that much. Besides if I want to get to a channel quickly, I just need to punch in the number plus .1 and I'm there. Never hurts anybody to slow down and take life easy.

The sound is going from the tuner through the DVD recorder through the TV set and out through the computer speakers I have plugged into the TV's headphone jack. The sound is very smooth, no crackling, no dropouts.

What I didn't like about the picture is I got these faded stripes going across the picture, and sometimes they even flip up and down almost like a vertical hold button gone haywire, and then they disappear. Not sure what that's about because, thank goodness, they didn't happen on every channel. I will say that I have a powered RCA brand antenna, so I wonder if the transformer of the antenna is interfering with it. I unplugged the antenna once and got NO signal, so that may or may not have been the problem. Something else to experiment in the next few months.

What I also didn't like is the remote, and would like to find some way to program it into my Philips Consolidator 4-Device remote (PM435S). I thought I'd put the tuner in the Cable/Sat button, since I'll need the TV part to actually turn the TV on and turn off the closed captioning on occasion.

There was another thread concerned about the closed-captioning on the device, and it does have the functionality of being able to choose typeface, size, and all that, but my TV (and all televisions since about '95) have had closed captioning built in, and the TV's CC kicks in without my even having to activate that of the Magnovox tuner, so I don't worry about it. I'm not deaf, but I use CC for watching sporting events, news, and movies, or if I just want to watch TV with the sound off. Closed captioning is the best thing since fried scrapple!

Regarding why I'm debating to keep it or not, I ran into a snag with my hookups. I still have a standalone mono Panasonic VCR which I have hooked up into my Samsung DVD recorder on its AV1 channel. Unfortunately, the Magnavox tuner needs that input because it doesn't have SVideo. So, I had to do some disconnecting and untangling of cords, and it was an awful mess. I also had to disconnect the antenna (plain old RCA rabbit ears I've had for 5 years) from the DVD recorder and connect it to the tuner so it could get a signal, which made sense. But I've decided I really need my VCR since I still have tapes that I enjoy from time to time. So for the time being I've disconnected the Magnavox tuner and reconfigured my TV-DVD-VCR-computer speaker setup back to the way I had it. So in the next ten months or so I'll be thinking of a way to make that situation work best for me.

Yesterday, I did realize that I could simply buy the digital tuner its own set of rabbit ears, and that would save me from having to disconnect the antenna from the DVD recorder, and while I'm at it, I could buy the tuner it's own set of RCA cables and simply unplug it (SIMPLY?!) whenever I wanted to watch the VCR. This could be a workaround I may experiment with in the next couple of weekends. There's a little antenna less than $10 that people are raving about on Circuit City, and it's not even powered; I may see how well that works for me.

Ultimately, I wonder if buying a DVD/VCR combo recorder with a tuner will be more advantageous, and may simplify my set-up considerably without a need for a separate tuner OR a VCR. There'll be a lot of stuff going to Goodwill if I go that route!

In the meantime, programming the remote will be the most important problem to solve. I really like my Philips with its LARGE, color-coded blue buttons, but the Magnavox is too recent an invention for it to have its codes, and it's not a learning remote. I hate getting rid of something that works well!

Anyway, I hope this post helps some of you lurkers who aren't as tech-y as these men who post seem to be. Don't be afraid of the tuner. It works, and you don't need fancy new equipment to get THIS box to work for you.

I also use a Philips PM435S remote. It has a Code Search method (see page eight of the user manual) to find codes not listed in the twelve pages of code lists. In addition to the TV button (assigned through the Code Search funtion) for a new Dynex LCD TV (a brand not listed in the code lists), a Westinghouse LCD TV is assigned to the VCR button, and a RCA CRT TV is assigned to the SAT/CBL button, and the DVD button is assigned to a Panasonic DVD player.

I tried to hook-up my TB100 this evening and ran into some difficulties. If I ran my coax from my antenna into the converter and a coax to the TV, all was well. However, when I tried to run RCA cables from the converter to the TV without the the coax to TV hookup, no luck. I tried various confugurations but to no avail. I simply had no luck running a signal from the converter to the TV with RCA cables.

Here are some pics of the inside of the unit. You can see two empty output slots one looks like s video and the other possibly digital audio, this has three chips one says japan , one says samsung and one says sharp also has a connector port possibly for firmware update on the circuit board directly above the sanyo tin can tuner.

I haven't succeeded in identifying the big chip (yet), but I suspect that
with 208 pins, it is a mainstream HDTV type SoC (System-On-A-Chip)
which has lots of "extra" (unused in converter box) interfaces.

Part number on smaller chip to right (Samsung?) is obscured by a sticker,
but looks like a memory chip (EPROM?).

I tried to hook-up my TB100 this evening and ran into some difficulties. If I ran my coax from my antenna into the converter and a coax to the TV, all was well. However, when I tried to run RCA cables from the converter to the TV without the the coax to TV hookup, no luck. I tried various confugurations but to no avail. I simply had no luck running a signal from the converter to the TV with RCA cables.

Anyone have similar stories??

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem, but I think you need to go back and look at page 9 of the manual. You don't need to put any RCA cables to the TV set because you're getting all your audio to the antenna. And you set your audio to RF, accordingly.

But, if you want to set it up like on page 10, then you need to go to your audio set up like it says to and change your audio output from RF to AUDIO OUT. (It'll show a picture of that on page 13.)

Please note that you can't watch anything until you've gone through the Setup Wizard completely. After that you can tweak it.